As much as I'd like to see more restrictions for Newbies, I think theymos has a point:
The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible.
~snip~
Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. ~ When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.
I'd say it's much better if people stop
off-topic posts in response. There's no need to tell them they should try their bank because they don't have collateral, and there's no need to tell them they won't get a loan. Just ignore the topic.
The same goes for the Currency exchange board, and I'm guilty of it too. When a Newbie scammer asks to buy 500,000 Bitcoins, once in a while I can't stop myself from responding. As long as scams aren't moderated, I'm with eddie13 on this:
Should never have put the temporary illusion of safety above personal liberty..
ie tagging and chasing away “likely scammers” and crushing the unique economic dynamic of account sales..
This forum started acting like protecting idiots is more important than letting users express their free wills..
How many countless good and intelligent users have been chased away because they “might” scam..
Look at it from a Newbie's perspective: he joins a forum, and sees all those people loaded with Bitcoin handing out money! "I want in on that!" is a natural reaction.
I think we should stop protecting people from taking risks: if they're dumb enough to send their money to a Newbie with no forum history, they're on their own.